A grand jury has reached a decision about whether to indict a Ferguson police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a spokesman for St. Louis County’s top prosecutor said Monday.

The panel has been considering charges against Darren Wilson, the white suburban St. Louis officer who fatally shot the black 18-year-old after a confrontation in August.

In a brief email to reporters, spokesman Ed Magee said the decision would be announced later Monday. He offered no immediate details.

The prosecutor’s office has told Brown’s relatives that the decision will be made public after 5 p.m., family attorney Benjamin Crump told The Associated Press.

News outlets are reporting that law enforcement (local, state, and federal), fire, and EMS units are staging and that traffic control barriers are being staged in and around various cities in the St. Louis area. Pawn shops in the area have reportedly been told to remove firearms and ammunition by law enforcement officers, but we were only able to receive statements of “no comment” from the half-dozen pawn shops we contacted.

That said, the riots that the mainstream media is all but encouraging if Officer Darren Wilson is not indicted for the death of assault and strong-arm robbery suspect Michael Brown may be more hype than substance.

The weather is dry and cold, with temperatures around 40 degrees slowly dropping into the 30s as the evening progresses. A brisk wind will make conditions feel substantially colder, with a 10+ MPH wind expected until 4:00AM Tuesday morning creating a wind chill factor that will make it feel like it is in the 20s. Put plainly, it is bitterly cold, and rotten weather for a protest.

There has been some speculation that many Ferguson residents will not be involved in the evening’s events, concerned that outside agitators are attempting to turn peaceful demonstrations into something ugly. They also seem quite worried about the possibility of heavily-prepared law enforcement being over-amped for a confrontation, and are worried that the many new gun owners in the area are heavily armed and possibly trigger happy.

Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com.
Bob is a graduate of roughly 400 hours of professional firearms training classes, including square range and force-on force work with handguns and carbines. He is a past volunteer instructor with Project Appleseed. He most recently received his Vehicle Close Quarters Combat Instructor certification from Centrifuge Training, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun.
He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.
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